This article was originally published on May 22, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Hilmar Pétursson just bought his studio back for roughly half its sale price in 2018. When Pearl Abyss acquired CCP Games, the deal was valued at $225 million. Earlier this month, the studio regained independent control for $120 million, comprising $100 million in cash and $20 million in token acquisition rights tied to forthcoming blockchain title Eve Frontier. Talking to us at Fanfest in Reykjavik, the CEO is relaxed about the arithmetic. 

"I mean, we just live in a different world than in 2018," he says. "It's tough [at the moment], and that expresses in company valuations… The valuation of gaming companies is different than in 2018. 

"It's more a story about our industry, I think, rather than about this particular transaction." 

The split, he insists, was genuinely cordial. Both companies had been moving in different directions. Pearl Abyss was focused on Crimson Desert's development (Pétursson is effusive about the game, noting he has "put 200 hours into it") while Fenris had its own evolving roadmap. Talks about collaborating on projects, including potential use of Pearl Abyss's Black Desert engine, never solidified. 

"We just never really got around to it," Pétursson says. "And then we thought, 'OK, are we really achieving that we were thinking about? Will we ever? Isn't it better to part ways?'" He describes the closing process as a digital high-five: "Everyone was very happy." 

In practical terms, little has changed. Fenris Creations' ownership structure is majority Icelandic. Alongside senior management, the investor base includes private Icelandic individuals and national pension funds. Pétursson has been a long-standing advocate for redirecting Icelandic pension capital towards domestic innovation. The funds, among the largest per capita in the world, currently send around 40 per cent of their allocation to Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.

"I've often said, 'OK, maybe we take one per cent and invest in innovation in Iceland,'" he laughs. The logic for pension funds, he argues, is that Fenris, with almost 30 years of history and stable cash flow, looks less like a tech startup and more like infrastructure. 

"We almost look like a utility. For a pension fund, it's almost like investing in a power company in Iceland."

With the company's independent future assured, the more immediately consequential question for the industry, and for the Eve Online faithful at this year's Fanfest, is what Fenris does next with New Eden, the universe of the game. The answer is that Fenris plans to run three live-service games simultaneously: Eve Online, extraction shooter Vanguard, and deep-space survival horror title Frontier.

Pétursson has been talking about putting "boots on the ground" in New Eden for years. Whether Vanguard succeeds in the high-risk-high-reward extraction-shooter market, a genre that has claimed numerous well-funded casualties, is, by his own admission, not something he worries about in the conventional way.

"Whether it's difficult, hard, a gamble, risky, I don't really care. We're doing it. It's fucking hard, but I'm not going to cry about it. This is the world we have chosen, and we will persevere and win."

Vanguard's alpha will run via Steam from July 7–20 this year, and Pétursson points to internal metrics suggesting that players familiar with the Eve IP will engage with Vanguard at levels that would, in his words, produce "the hottest-shit shooter ever made." The challenge is closing the gap with players who have no prior relationship with New Eden. That divide, and how much progress the summer alpha succeeds in reducing it, is how he's defining success for this phase.

Frontier is a longer, more structural bet. The game is built around an open, blockchain-mediated economy. The studio has spent decades managing real-money trading and black-market currency exchange within Eve Online.

"Eve Online is a closed economy, kind of like Iceland was in the '80s under currency controls," Pétursson jokes. "But the economy has been opened, and that's been a rather good thing for Iceland, which now has almost the highest GDP per capita in the world."

The game is also designed as an open platform and is literally open source. Frontier's architecture lets third parties add features without the studio's permission. A recent hackathon attracted 800 participants and 128 submitted projects, a scale Pétursson describes as exceeding "all our wildest expectations." The Frontier development budget is separately financed, which means, he emphasises, that it is not cannibalising Eve Online's operating revenue: "That isolates it as a business risk."

Finally, the long public roadmap announced for Eve Online at Fanfest, anchored by the release of the Cradle Of War expansion next month, is itself a signal worth noting. Pétursson frames it as evidence that the studio's endless internal refinement of technology and teams has reached a point where long-horizon planning is emerging naturally.

The third major development announced in Reykjavik, and in some respects the one with the widest implications, is a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Pétursson has known DeepMind founder and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis for a decade. The partnership is not primarily a product integration, but rather a research programme using an offline version of Eve Online as a test bed before anything AI-related gets pulled into the live game.

"We have to figure out the boundaries, and the AI needs to know the basics," Pétursson says. "Just like having humans know the basics of Eve Online – it takes a while."

Pétursson also expects to see papers published as a result of the collaboration. The intellectual basis of the partnership rests on a shared belief that games are learning environments.

"Playing and learning are extremely related," he notes. "We hear constant stories of people who come and describe to me in elaborate detail how Eve has taught them the truth about themselves and made them the best version of themselves."

The endpoint of the DeepMind partnership is, of course, typically ambitious.

"I think we'll find something epic that will really make life for all of us better in the long run," Pétursson concludes. DeepMind, he says, is "in awe" of Eve as an AI research base: "That brings an extremely inspiring twist to the partnership, how eager and frankly giddy they are. They frame it as like an honour to get to work with Eve players and Fenris Creations on finding some cool shit that will benefit mankind."

This article was originally published on May 22, 2026 - read the full issue